Is Robinhood Unlocking Crypto’s Next Frontier?

Summary

• Avi’s viral thesis, expanded on air: crypto is no longer a separate thing — “I don’t think crypto is a thing anymore. It’s just finance, tech.” The all-in-crypto career bet that made sense in 2017 “will be a mistake in a way that wasn’t true for the last 10 years”; his bet is that “the best funds over the next three years are the ones that are doing macro and crypto,” and the “crypto-natives will pump this” playbook no longer works reliably.
• Robinhood’s launch of stock tokens, an L2 blockchain, perps, and staking is, per Avi, “possibly the biggest announcement that has ever been made in the history of crypto” — “going straight for Coinbase’s lunch, going straight for Hyperliquid’s lunch.” They flagged Robinhood at $25; it’s $100 now, and “I don’t think the run for Hood is over… it may just be a beginning.”
• The pair’s cleanest trade expression: Robinhood issuing tokens first on Arbitrum but moving to its own L2 “tells you everything you need to know about L1s” — “buy Robinhood and Bitcoin and short all L1s and L2s against it.” Supporting evidence: the likely Solana ETF landed and “no one cares.”
• Avi’s altcoin math: total crypto cap ~$3.5T, ~$2.1T of it Bitcoin, leaving $1.3T of “other stuff” he doesn’t believe half of. ETH at $309B is not justified (“No. For what it is?”); pure monetary plays (Dogecoin) make more sense to him, while Ripple $132B and BNB $96B are reasonable. He says he is holding HYPE and Maple because they are “real products generating real revenue.”
• Avi’s macro through-line: “SPY is the new US dollar” — tokenized stocks could let you minimize fiat float, with cards that may auto-borrow or auto-sell against your portfolio, competing on-chain lenders replacing the Schwab/JPM lending lock-in, and a “Cambrian explosion” of tokenized-vs-listed arbitrage creating “Wintermute 2.0” firms. The dollar is “already down 15% this year… and mark my words, it’s going to get worse.”
• Politics: Jonah initially says both parties pump their bags, but Avi rejects that framing — democratic socialists get elected on redistribution, so Democrats are very bearish BTC, Republicans very bullish BTC. The knee-jerk BTC dip when a likely Mamdani/AOC-wing candidate gets priced in around late ‘26–‘27 is “the dip to buy… with both hands,” conditional on under $200K.
• Avi’s crystal ball for the balance of the year: Ukraine ceasefire or permanent peace by year-end, a bunch of rate cuts (Powell pressured, or OPEC collapses and inflation forces his hand), AI-driven deflation, a Gaza ceasefire — “markets send,” with the midterms or overextension as the main risks.
• The next frontier as crypto mainstreams: betting markets. Likely Polymarket priced US strikes on Iran at ~30% when people paying attention could say 80%; its likely Mamdani-Cuomo market lagged while Eric Adams had not really ripped into him. Avi invested in a stealth startup building an AMM for betting markets — “there should be as many markets on Polymarket as there are tokens on likely Pump.fun.”

Deep dive

1. “I don’t think crypto is a thing anymore” — the tweet and what it meant

• Avi’s viral post, written after “two glasses of wine,” distilled a decade: he took “a crazy risk at the age of 21” in 2017, when crypto meant building “an entirely parallel financial system… our whole new utopia over here” — 0% of time on financial news, 100% on ICOs, Solidity, and the L1-vs-L2 wars. Now: “Focusing your life on crypto will be a mistake in a way that wasn’t true for the last 10 years.”
• The irony he owns openly: in 2017 they mocked the “blockchain not bitcoin” crowd — but “that world kind of played out… everything that’s being built that’s useful is a company that just happens to use crypto tech.” Since the Trump election, crypto has gone “fully 100% mainstream”: three years ago they fought the SEC tooth and nail; “today, the SEC works with us and the administration works with us.”
• The career corollary, for the 22-year-olds who DM him asking whether to go all-in: three years ago he’d have said skip the traditional route; today, “go get your MBA and focus on crypto” — the best builders he knows now come from the traditional world. “Are you a trader or are you a crypto trader? … saying that you’re a crypto trader is not the smartest thing to do anymore.”
• Jonah’s confirmation from the other side: when he left oil trading, saying “I’m a crypto trader” got looks “like I had leprosy”; now, with Bitcoin at $110K, “you almost get acceptance” — which is exactly the problem. “Crypto is definitely not contrarian anymore… how much upside is there left? The answer could be a lot, but is it asymmetric relative to the risk you’re taking in other asset classes?”

2. The altcoin ledger: $1.3 trillion Avi doesn’t believe in

• The math as he laid it out: total crypto market cap $3.5T, with $2.1T in Bitcoin — leaving $1.3T of everything else, “and to be completely honest, Jonah, I don’t really believe in half of this shit anymore.” Should ETH be valued at $309B? “No. For what it is?” Jonah’s harsher version: “it’s $300 billion worth of FTDB… you need it to become the official currency of an alien civilization to justify that market cap.”
• What survives Avi’s cut is telling: pure monetary plays and cash-flow businesses. Dogecoin “justifies its market cap the most” among the monetary premia; Ripple at $132B and BNB at $96B are “reasonable” — “that’s a real product… and they do buybacks.” He says he holds HYPE and Maple “because those are real products generating real revenue” — but the accumulate-at-the-lows-for-a-50x meme trade “is much tougher than it used to be.”
• The dead playbook, named precisely: “the game that you can’t really play anymore is: this is going to appeal to the crypto-natives and the crypto-natives are going to take this up… too many people like me have tapped out of this framework.” If you’re planning to become “a degenerate trench trader” now, “that game is basically done” — with the honest caveat that “there is going to be a period where there’s going to be like two months of that working, and everyone’s going to be like, oh, I’m a genius again.”

3. Robinhood’s stock tokens: the two-way door finally opens

• The announcement — stock tokens, a revealed L2 blockchain, perps, and staking — landed after Avi wrote his tweet, and he calls it “possibly the biggest announcement that has ever been made in the history of crypto… going straight for Coinbase’s lunch, going straight for Hyperliquid’s lunch,” with an entire traditional-markets business already attached. “Robin Hood is, I think, going to become the focal point of the financial system if they pull this off correctly.”
• His framing of why this attempt differs from Pendle, Maple, or Luna’s Mirror in 2021: those were “a one-way trapdoor — traditional assets went through the crypto door and you couldn’t go the other way. Now you finally have a two-way door.” European customers get 200+ US stock and ETF tokens; a year out, he sees “hundreds of stocks trading on crypto rails.” The likely Johan Kerbrat’s line: “crypto was built by engineers for engineers” — and it’s finally hitting the mainstream.
• The trade both hosts converged on: tokens launch on Arbitrum, but future issuance moves to Robinhood’s own L2 — “which just tells you everything you need to know about L1s… buy Robinhood and Bitcoin and short all L1s and L2s against it.” Exhibit A: the likely Solana ETF — “no one cares. All the tokens that were supposed to be parabolically mooning on that — Jupiter — no one cares. Just buy Robinhood stock. It’s a real company.”
• Jonah’s symmetry observation: Kraken launched likely xStocks (unpaid mention, he notes) — “Robinhood is a tradfi platform onboarding crypto; Kraken is a crypto-native platform onboarding tradfi. They’re both coming at the same prize from opposite ends” — Kraken, he thinks, has more than 10M users; Robinhood just over 20M.

4. “SPY is the new US dollar” — what tokenization actually unlocks

• Avi’s ranking of the benefits: 24/7 trading is the obvious one, but the real ones are borrowing and transfer. On-chain lending against tokenized equities (he names Syrup and likely Aave) means “you can compete lots of different lenders easily — you aren’t locked into the Schwab or JP Morgan lending ecosystem,” versus his own brokerage transfer that left his assets invisible for weeks: “I would look at my two apps and I would look completely broke.”
• The macro punchline: “Cash is trash. I do not want to hold a single US dollar… I think SPY is the new US dollar — invest in 500 American companies that make stuff, don’t invest in the fiat piece of paper that’s getting printed into oblivion.” The dollar is “already down 15% this year — it’s the freaking global reserve currency… mark my words, it’s going to get worse.” Argentina already holds Bitcoin; he thinks the developed world will increasingly prefer indices over trashed fiat.
• Jonah’s liquidity concern and Avi’s operational version: Jonah’s whole life is minimizing checking-account balance relative to net worth. Today, selling-and-wiring takes 24–72 hours and a portfolio loan takes five to seven days; Avi imagines a future card that auto-borrows against your tokenized stock portfolio — “swipe and borrow against your spies on chain, or swipe and sell $3 worth of spies to pay for your espresso,” which Avi says is basically what the Robinhood card will do.
• The trader-facing consequence: on-chain listings open “billions of opportunities” to arbitrage IBM against tokenized IBM — “a Cambrian explosion of new opportunities in the low-latency arbitrage space… there are going to be some new firms that pop up that make absolute fortunes, like what Wintermute did, but 2.0.”

5. Race communists vs. debt fascists — and where the hosts split

• Avi’s political taxonomy, verbatim: “we basically have a bunch of race communists and on the other side a bunch of debt fascists… Neither of them are going to manage the debt. Both of them are going to spend excessive amounts of money.” Jonah’s initial read is that both sides pump money into the system “and we’re going to reap the benefits.”
• Avi’s disagreement — the sharpest exchange of the episode: if the likely Mamdani/AOC wing wins, “they are being given a mandate to take money out of capital markets” — capital gains taxes, redistribution — “that is bearish for your capital… a poor person can hold Bitcoin and still get screwed by that.” His net: “Politically, Democrats are very bearish BTC. Politically, Republicans are very bullish BTC, even though they’re both going to expand the deficit.”
• Jonah’s counterpoint rather than rebuttal: socialist policies are “much, much worse for equities than for crypto, because Bitcoin is in theory a hedge against governments debasing the dollar” — expanding the deficit is good for Bitcoin unless there’s a specific attack on Bitcoin, “which is a very reasonable possibility actually, unfortunately,” since crypto has been politicized. Both agree the window is safe “until late ‘26,” with the midterms as the biggest risk factor — that or “overextension.”
• Jonah’s aside on scale: socialism “works really well” at kibbutz scale or an employee-owned firm like likely Vitol — “a couple thousand people” — “it’s when you try to scale that up to a country of hundreds of millions that it doesn’t really work anymore.”

6. The crystal ball: markets send, then buy the 2026–27 BTC dip with both hands

• Avi’s balance-of-year sequence: at least a ceasefire, “probably a permanent peace in Ukraine by end of year”; “a bunch of rate cuts” — either Powell gets pressured, or the ceasefire drags commodities lower, OPEC collapses, and inflation gives Powell no choice; AI-driven acceleration in growth and deflation across the corporate economy; another Gaza ceasefire. Net: “Trump is going to start to look like a Nobel Peace Prize candidate instead of a giant orange monkey clown… I think markets send.”
• Then the setup: democratic socialists take over the Democratic party, win some elections while national popularity declines, and as their presidential candidate “starts making noise,” the knee-jerk move on BTC is lower — “and I think that’s the dip to buy realistically… you buy that with both hands,” hedged with his stated condition: “depending on the price, of course, but if it’s still under 200K, I think you buy that dip in 2026 or 27.”
• Their scoreboard on the year so far, claimed as a victory lap: they called on the podcast around Liberation Day that Trump wouldn’t let tariffs tank the market — “he anchored the negotiations at an extreme point and extracted a better outcome… they landed the plane, which is kind of unexpected.” Iran war: “nothing burger.” Ukraine hasn’t moved markets “in the last year and a half.”

7. Betting markets are the next frontier — and they’re still “wacko”

• Avi’s pitch: as crypto mainstreams, the next genuinely inefficient market is betting markets. His examples of mispricing: likely Polymarket had US strikes on Iran priced around 30% when “if you were paying attention, you could have priced that at 80%”; its market on likely Zohran Mamdani beating Cuomo in the primary lagged while Eric Adams had not really ripped into him.
• Avi caught the same likely Mamdani trade from the ground: “you have eyes when you’re in New York — you see a shit-ton of people canvassing for likely Mamdani and not a single goddamn person for Cuomo, and every liberal friend is ridiculously excited about this guy” — he saw it when likely Mamdani was “at around 25%.” His mechanical point: it’s “almost easier than trading” because the odds are explicit — “what does $67 WTI mean? We don’t know what that’s pricing in” — and a mispriced 8% event you think is 80% beats buying a sure thing at 60.
• Avi’s cross-market edge: oil “prices in a lot more insider information than likely Polymarket, which is just a bunch of degenerates gambling on stuff they don’t understand” — so a student of macro “will constantly identify opportunities on likely Polymarket and likely Kalshi that are just wacko.” His money is where his mouth is: last month he invested in a stealth startup by a former Polymarket/Kalshi builder making an AMM for betting markets — “there should be as many markets on Polymarket as there are tokens on likely Pump.fun.”

8. The revenue meta, the halo effect, and “buy the frontier”

• Avi’s read from likely EthCC in France: “we’re firmly out of VC mode and firmly into the revenue meta, which is going to last forever” — builders talking about bringing money on-chain and extracting some of it, market-maker tracking dashboards for ICOs, tradfi-to-onchain arbitrage. “Tokens are basically just equities at this point, equities are tokens, and the lines are getting blurred.”
• His career mechanism for newcomers: the halo effect — “if you’re good at one thing, people assume you’re good at other things,” and crypto remains the easiest place to build a name “because there aren’t as many experts.” Prove yourself by writing in public: “second-year associates at Lazard… posting and got a following of 50,000 people because it turned out they’re really smart.” (His own halo has limits — a friend recently asked him for relationship advice: “I bet you have good relationship advice for me. And I’m just like — what?”)
• Jonah’s two-paths taxonomy: his own “white shoe” route — Ivy League, Goldman, the top oil shop, taking risk inside prestige boxes — versus Avi’s “risk of a lifetime” at 21, then “piling risk upon risk upon risk,” the GCR-style street-smart path he thinks gets there faster. His closing advice for “the final innings of crypto as a contrarian asset class”: dive into something new, become the expert, parlay back via publishing. It doesn’t have to be AI or robotics — “there’s always a market somewhere… maybe you’re the guy hauling chicken oil from Chinese restaurants into a renewable diesel refinery. Buy the frontier.”
• Avi’s outside-crypto positioning, disclosed in passing: an investment in a robotics company, and RKLB as one of his bigger wins this year — “it tracks SpaceX quite nicely because they’ve got a good contract there.” And the tweet’s coda: “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just not calling myself a crypto trader anymore.”